


Of Gods and Lovers

by harlequinblue



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: M/M, Religion, sort of vague spoilers for 1.10 (i guess)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 12:31:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6566290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harlequinblue/pseuds/harlequinblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mick has some issues with gods. They never really get resolved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Gods and Lovers

**Author's Note:**

> So this happened. I was in a weird mood? Also I think Mick has a more complicated inner life than most people give him credit for.

Mick grew up Baptist. In a town too small for any map, with only one gas station and the nearest Walmart two towns over, it was the only option.

 

So he went to church every Sunday with his parents just like every other sorry fucker in that town. Stared up at the super-sized cross and mouthed along to the hymns with his mother’s vicious pinching of the inside of his elbow keeping him going when all he wanted to do was fall asleep because 7 am was way too early for anything, even God. He listened to the sermons and he tried so fucking hard to feel something, to find that zeal for Christ that everyone seemed to have in spades or the peace that passes understanding that everyone went on about but somehow never managed to really find (or at least it seemed that way to him, his town was so good at lying to itself)

 

But the closest thing he ever found to peace was nowhere near a church pew but rather out behind his family’s cornfields watching other people’s possessions go up in smoke.

Sometimes, when the fire was dying and that strange daze was breaking, he wondered if maybe he was already marked for hell. Because the only time he felt any kind of stirring in that place they said was a sanctuary was when the preacher was shouting about fire and brimstone, watching the sinners burning in that eternal flame. As the amens echoed around him all he could picture was setting this fuckin' town on fire and walking away as it burned, people screaming, all the rotten secrets brought to light and finally burned clean.

 

And then one day he did burn it. Part of it at least. Poured the gas and lit the match. Found a real nice spot up on that hill to watch the show from. And it was funny, for such a religious town not a one person showed up to put out the fire. But plenty of people lined the street to watch the big-bellied sheriff drag him off to the county jail. And plenty of people shouted about how he deserved to go to hell when the state police came to take him next county over for trial. 

 

He didn’t particularly care when the verdict was read. One prison was very like another. He only really kicked up a fuss when they took his lighter. It had belonged to his cousin and was all he had left to remember of the Sundays she would sneak him out of Sunday School or volunteer to take care of him when he was “sick” on those days he couldn’t face that echoing sanctuary and all the unfulfilled promises it held for him. They’d sit out behind the ice cream parlor that never took off, trading cigarettes and talking about all the ways this town and its god had failed them.

 

He went to juvie in the next state. And of course that'd be where he’d meet Len, with his blue blue eyes and hands so cold they shook the first time he pushed him down on that standard issue prison mattress. And Mick, well, Mick found the religion he’d been searching for all his life. He found the passion that made him want to scream his belief to the skies and he found the calm that he’d ached for but never found on his knees in front of an unseeing cross.

 

But you can’t build your alter in a person and you can’t make a god out of a lover. They will falter and they will fail and they will cut you open with their betrayal and burn you from the inside out the way the guilt should have but never did. He spent centuries dreaming of vengeance, hoping (praying) it would cleanse him, purify him the way the baptismal pool never did. The way those cold hands and blue blue eyes never did.

 

But all he feels is empty. And as he stares down into that bruised face with his fist raised at one more false god, all he can think is that no one told him religion would be this confusing or that it would hurt so badly to let go of.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to expand this and build on it sometime but I don't when I'll be in this kind of mood again. Let me know what you think or if you catch any typos I missed.


End file.
